EARLY RISERS AND ARRIVING EARLY TO WORK

EARLY RISERS AND ARRIVING EARLY TO WORK

"And let fall also some of the handfuls of purpose for her, and leave them, that she may glean them, and rebuke her not." (Holy Bible, Ruth 2:16)

Up with the Larks! I have always been an early riser. Waking up at 6am to get ready for school, even though my schools were less than 2 miles and didn’t start until 9am. Mum made us girls wake up at this time everyday. And regardless when it was half term holidays or the six weeks school holiday, I still got up early around 7:30am. We had a very strict bedtime also, we went to sleep at 9pm everyday, regardless of the weekend! No arguments. No negotiation. My mother held onto this discipline with us well into our teenage years. In our household, the time of staying up late came when I left home at 17 years old, but I still fell asleep by 10pm during a working week, I had worked in Business Administration for many years.

And when I studied for my degree, which was distance learning with the Open University, (I was also a stay at home mum), in the wee early hours of the morning, starting at 3am until 7am, whereupon I wrote up my assignments before even the dawn chorus of the birds! Then I would wake my daughter to get ready for school, then on my return journey to my home from doing this, I would walk the whole way. Once home, I would study again, doing any research and prep for the next assignment, until it was time for me to pick my daughter up from school, as well as looking after the household and garden for the rest of the day.

This was the pattern of rising early in the mornings that remained with me throughout my working life too. However, these days I am getting up at 4am or 5am in the morning. I only need a good, deep sleep of 4-5 hours, and I’m fine for the rest of the day until 9pm, when I start to become sleepy. But I force myself to stay up until at least 11pm or midnight, because I need so little sleep. If I don't do this, I'm up and alert by 2am or 3am with extra time on my hands, and my brain is ready for action! The down-side of that happening, is that I would crash out sooner by the end of the day. So, I know myself and how I manage my time.

My daughter is the exact opposite, she is a night owl, who is alert come evening. She even studied her 13 GCSEs (yes, she passed all exams including Double Science), and A levels, which took her to the conventional University of Exeter, listening to heavy metal rock music (with headphones), her favourite band to listen to being: Cradle of Filth, whilst I slept. And then we were ships that passed in the night, around 3am. When I rose, she would go to sleep. She purposely wore slogan t-shirts declaring that she wasn't a morning person, and any happy preppy demeanour would be met with heavy sarcasm. We gave each other space, to be our constitutional selves, and met up to communicate around 7pm when we were both "switched on" so to speak.

However, being a morning person, and someone who has throughout their career gone into work early, there is a negative policing/judgement/comparison that comes from others. People forget that people of colour are not created homogenously, but rather heterogeneously in nature. The beginnings of each word, which indicate how they differ. In homogeneous, homo- means “same.” In heterogeneous, hetero- means “different” or “other.” The reason I state this, is because I don't do "black people's time" which is a negative and feeds into the Ethnic Stereotypes, claiming they can have a relaxed or indifferent view of punctuality, which leads to them being labelled as lazy or unreliable. Like, somehow, a person of colour doesn't know about Time and Time Management. Whereupon, 'Time' can also be viewed as a social construct (Is Time A Social Construct, Or Does It Actually Exist?). Context is everything.

As stated by Physics.com.sg: "How we experience time depends on several factors, such as our level of attention, emotions, and memories. As the saying goes, “Time flies when you are having fun”. Studies have even shown that time speeds up the higher you live. The concept and perception of time are not fixed to a single region in our brain. It involves various parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus, cerebellum, parietal cortex, basal ganglia, and frontal cortex.

Humans also sense time based on how our body feels. Depending on specific times of the day, we might feel energetic, sleepy, or hungry. This is due to our body’s circadian rhythm, also known as our body’s own 24-hour biological sleep-wake cycle, helping us maintain awareness of the specific time and control our body’s regular vital functions."

She rises also while it is yet night, and gives meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens. (Holy Bible, Proverbs 31:15)

It was also assumed that your social life is deviant: walk of shame, because it was when female sex workers would be on their way home, if they worked the night shift. You saw them, but I passed no judgement. The worst early morning experience that I had on my way to work, is when someone, a stranger, throw her coffee at me in the street, as we passed each other, because I looked too happy and put together first thing in the morning. No, I didn't retaliate. As some people practice "rage baiting" or the stereotype of an "angry black woman", and from this awareness, a person such as myself, knows not to entertain them, due to tone-policing, that is a tone argument (also called tone policing) is a type of ad hominem aimed at the tone of an argument instead of its factual or logical content. I'll point it out here: I'm British, born in England, coming from a British Culture. The best experience, is when you'd meet the regulars at the bus stop or tube platform that made the same time as you starting their day early, or the dog walkers, joggers, or those who were old-school Urbanites, who greeted each other with a cheery "good morning" and you'd nod and say "good morning" as you passed each other. This doesn't happen on the way home in the evening! Or to those who travel everywhere by car or cycled into work. No shade.

However, in addition to that, if you’re an attractive person of colour and female, that goes into work early, it's assumed that your after someone romantically/social mobility climbing eg. seeking to be noticed by male management in the upper echelon of the organisation, because they tended to arrive early to work too. Funny enough, the senior management would keep to themselves, and I never was interested in climbing up the career ladder. Just because others have managed to make connections this way, I didn't. The most I would say is "good morning" and got on with the rest of my morning routine.

In an article written on Schmoozing with Bigwigs, "...to figure this out, they mapped the networks and status of 2,000 adults (using ratings of how much they admired and were influenced by a person as a marker of status) and then looked to see if proximity to high-status people did indeed boost someone’s status. Men fit the expected pattern. The more high-powered people you know, the more people respect and admire you. But things looked very different for women. When women built networks rich with high-status contacts, instead of receiving a status boost, their status gradually declined over time, the authors explain.

Why wasn’t a mystery. “People typically don’t like dominant and ambitious female leaders, research shows,” the authors explain. “We infer that people presume a woman whose network is centering on high-status individuals is gathering resources for herself at the expense of others in the group.” The woman’s own reputation takes a hit as a result.

Similarly, Yu and Shea outline “a strategy for women to overcome this attitude and gain high-status connections without backlash: signalling group orientation.” If you’re schmoozing with high-profile people, make sure it is known you’re doing it to help out others, not for — god forbid! — your own benefit alone..." (Yet Another Annoying Study About Double Standards at Work Shows Social Climbing Works for Men but Backfires Spectacularly for Women)

Love not sleep, lest thou come to poverty; open thine eyes, and thou shalt be satisfied with bread. (Holy Bible, Proverbs 20:13)

And also the micro-aggression in the workplace, of being accused of trying to show up others regarding their poor time management, which is the furthest from the truth. Those on that team, also complained when I left work early (either I used flexi-time or finished on time 4:30pm) having something negative to say about it. I just happen to respect time. It's value that I was taught to hold sacred. And I was actually told by a colleague to “stop arriving early as it’s showing the rest of us up!” And when asked why I should stop, their answer was that management would expect the same standard from them. But they failed to look around the building, there were many who arrived in the early morning. It's all with the same aim, getting ahead start on our day! It helps for some "Me-Time", and that time is mine to do what I want, and it also sets out my day and for me to give my best during the day because my mindset has been set of what I want to get out of day, to feel productive, and satisfied that I made a difference, influenced someone, or created an impact of positivity.

There has been only one time at the DWP, that I tried to come in at 8:45am in the morning to work, for a 9am start to the day. Never again. I was so stressed. I hadn't the chance to read my diary of appointments or respond to Journal messages from customers. That I had one of my worst days of my work life. It went down hill from there. Everyone was worried when they came into the office, and I still hadn't arrived. The public transport with so many people. And it took me ages to get on a bus, even living in London, the buses are packed. That my DWP Line Manager was concerned enough to call me on my mobile phone to know what happened to me. As it was so unlike me to arrive in the "normal" office hour at the start of the day, like everyone else. His Line Manager had to tell him, that if he didn't see me by 10am in the morning, then, and only then, should he rise the alarm bells! So rather than inflict this again on him, I went back to arriving early into the Jobcentre.

At the DWP my working hours (officially) are 8am to 4:30pm. But I arrive just after 7am. I have breakfast at the office, as we have fantastic kitchen facilities. And that still gives me two solid hours to take care of my administration, reading updates on the DWP intranet.

At 8am I log onto the Universal Credit build and see to journal messages, and those of the Team that has journal messages that state the customer is "at risk", and I see my diary of appointments as well as any history notes, and caseload other actions. So by the time the first customer is at my desk station, I am aware of how my day will go generally.

After 4:30pm, I use this time to plan and to do anything that requires financial support funding, ending sanctions etc., for a customer. And as my daughter now works for the Telephony side of the DWP, her day doesn't finish until 6pm. So I leave my on-site location at the Jobcentre around 5:30pm. This is so my daughter can finish her day working from home, with a routine. So by the time I walk through the door, work has finished for both of us.

As some studies have shown that waking up early can lead to better performance in areas such as memory and attention, and can also align with the natural circadian rhythm of the body, leading to better sleep at night.

If you’re reading this in the early morning, chances are you’re an early bird, often referred to as a “lark.” If it’s very late at night, you may be a “night owl.”

You may have come to think of yourself as clearly one or the other, but research shows that most of us likely fall somewhere in the middle. These people are what author Daniel Pink refers to as “third birds.”

And whether we perform at our best at mental or physical activities depends on the right alignment of the tasks with our personal chronotype. Pink writes that, “What ultimately matters…is that type, task, and time align –– what social scientists call ‘the synchrony effect.’”

In his best-selling book, WHEN: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Pink notes from research the three chronotypes distribution: larks are 14 percent; owls are 21 percent; and third birds make up 65 percent of the population.

Studies prove this sleep inertia, or sleep-induced brain fog, can last anywhere from two to four hours. Waking up earlier gives your body time to reach peak wakefulness naturally (without depending on coffee) to do your best work at the start of your workday.

The reasons for morning people being more successful seem to be linked to their general attitude and mindset. A Harvard biologist, Christoph Randler, did some research on this and concluded that early birds are generally more pro-active, and this results in higher levels of productivity.

Also, cruising to work uninhibited, strolling onto and getting a seat on the train or just being able to walk along a quiet street in the early morning are all much nicer ways to start the day. There is also the connection with the night shift people and those regulars you meet at the bus stop, that greet you and give a sense of continuity to the morning as well as the bird song. As this will help to get you in the right frame of mind and generally is a better way to prepare for the office.

Being punctual can also help you follow your own schedule by allowing you to complete all of your work during work hours. By arriving to work late, you risk missing meetings and getting behind on important tasks, which may mean working outside of normal hours. Being early or on time can help you work on or ahead of schedule and reserve your free time for other things. It also ensures you can go home on time, which helps you keep a healthy work-life balance.

Consistently being on time for work can also help you showcase your leadership potential. Arriving to work on time can help you set a good example for your colleagues. By being punctual, you can show that you are responsible, committed and ambitious — all of which are traits of good leaders. Showcasing leadership characteristics can help you get raises and promotions and advance your career as a whole.

Another advantage to coming to work early is that arriving at the office before your colleagues is that it's a very effective way to focus on work and avoid the usual distractions of a busy office. You’ll get some quality time. And psychologically, you feel that this in part of the day, being early to work, you are in control of your destiny, as you are more likely to be in an Alpha set of mind.

Being able to concentrate wholly on your workload makes for a super-productive period and you’ll find that it’s potentially the most beneficial time of the day.

It’s not just colleagues questions or requests for assistance that you’ll avoid either. Working ‘out of hours’ will also mean that you’ll not receive external emails or calls either (other than spam of course), so you won’t need to worry about switching between what you’re doing and checking the normally never ending stream of incoming messages.

“Awake up, my glory; awake, psaltery and harp: I myself will awake early” (Holy Bible, Psalm 57:8)

Arriving to work early can be very beneficial. Is this something we should be encouraging our staff to do more often? What are the actual benefits of showing up before your scheduled start time?

Firstly, if we expect employees to arrive to work early, their work environment has to be desirable. Investing time and money into creating a welcoming working space, will make it a place where employees will wish to spend their time. This not only actively encourages earlier arrivals; it will also boost levels of productivity. If an employee is happy in their surroundings, they will be in a better frame of mind, therefore, in turn, be driven to do more work.

From an employees’ perspective, arriving that little bit earlier gives them time to settle in. Spending some time making a cup of coffee and catching up with colleagues before starting the working day is a great place to begin.

Like-wise, employees who do put the effort in to begin work slightly earlier than their start time, should be recognised. Mangers should be noticing who is early, as it shows enthusiasm and reflects great organisation skills. This is a good factor to mention during employee appraisals.

During a discussion with an employee, it may be wise to help them set up a plan for the day. Giving an employee a sample of how to allocate their time and add structure to the work day should encourage them to do this for themselves. Furthermore, if an employee does take this step on board, they are likely to start work earlier, as they will arrive and plan ahead – leading to more productive work.

Interestingly, setting a daily schedule can be linked to goal-setting techniques. When an employee is due a three-month review or one-on-one session with their manager and/or HR body, this can be discussed. If a manager wishes to guide an employee to think strategically and set their own goals, the SMART technique is highly recommended.

The results would reflect the intensity of modern working life with the re-experience self-efficacy, and co-worker support, and challenge avoidance beliefs.

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REFERENCES:

"Up with the Larks" image, by Gail Brodholt, Linocut on paper Signed and titled in pencil Trial Proof aside from the numbered edition of 75 Image, size: 340 x 330mm Paper size: 500 x 500mm

Stillman, J., (2024), Yet Another Annoying Study About Double Standards at Work Shows Social Climbing Works for Men but Backfires Spectacularly for Women, Entry Level Rebel, published by INC magazine. Yet Another Annoying Study About Double Standards at Work Shows Social Climbing Works for Men but Backfires Spectacularly for Women, [accessed 31/10/24]

Synching Your Body Clock to Be Your Best

Are Early Risers More Successful in Business?

Sleep Cycle Calculator – How to Determine How Much Sleep You Need

Encouraging Early Arrival at Work - Clover HR

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